Blages

Thursday, February 23, 2012

The Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship Incorporated

So, here's an update for you on the development of the Ronin Institute. I've written about the concept and motivation for Ronin previously (e.g., here, here, and here). Briefly, the goal is to establish an institute to support scholarly research outside of the traditional (university / government lab / research institute) environment.

Well, the Ronin Institute is now incorporated in the State of New Jersey. The official name of the corporation is "The Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship Incorporated." That's obviously a mouthful. As it turns out, having something like "Incorporated" or "Corporation" is a requirement for an official corporation name in New Jersey. It seems, then, that the standard practice is to have two names for your corporation. One is the official, legal name. Then, you file additional paperwork to establish a legal alias (like, "The Ronin Institute"), which you can put on your checks, letterhead, etc.

Now, some of you may be reading this and saying, "Why the heck are you forming a corporation?" After all, the whole concept here is that independent scholars want and need is independence, not a corporate overlord. In fact, a "corporation" may sound worse than a university when you think about issues like academic freedom.

Well, it turns out that incorporating is the first step in establishing a non-profit. For the Ronin Institute, the incorporation paperwork was filed on February 13. I have just finished working with the other people who will form the initial board of directors to iron out the bylaws for the institute. The next step will be to submit the federal application for tax-exempt status. At that point, we will have a fully formed non-profit, and we can begin in earnest the work of changing the way that research is done in the country and in the world.

Why am I telling you all of this? For those of you who are interested specifically in the Ronin Institute and its mission – and especially those among you who may eventually be interested in joining up – I want to keep you up to date on our progress.

There may also be some of you out there who are interested in the idea of independent scholarship, and are thinking about forming your own non-profit research institute. For you, I want to provide a sense of how the process works. Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to post information about creating bylaws, establishing a board of directors, and preparing the federal application documents.

In the meantime,here's an adorable video of an adorable baby aardvark!

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